


Business As Usual

by TheCokeworthCauldrons



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Wooden Overcoats (Podcast)
Genre: Attempt at Humor, Crack, Crack Crossover, Eric needs friends, Gen, Georgie doesn’t need anything. She’s great at needing nothing, Humor, It’s funny to me at least, Post-Canon, Post-War, Rudyard needs a nap, Severus Snape of course is dead, We all know what Antigone needs: fulfilling hobbies, since no one else would write it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-06
Updated: 2020-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:55:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23039686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheCokeworthCauldrons/pseuds/TheCokeworthCauldrons
Summary: The Funns very explicitly have no cousins of interest. They have bills and Chapman asking stupid questions, that’s all!
Relationships: Eric Chapman & Georgie Crusoe & Antigone Funn & Rudyard Funn & Madeleine, Except no Madeleine it’s too hot, Georgie Crusoe & Antigone Funn, Georgie Crusoe & Rudyard Funn
Comments: 2
Kudos: 13





	Business As Usual

**Author's Note:**

> As soon as Rudyard Funn opened his awful little mouth, I thought, “Now there’s an idea!” So! Here’s an idea! Enjoy yourselves!

The phone kept ringing. It simply couldn’t be borne. The irreverently cheery sun in the clear blue of the Piffling sky shone down on Funn Funerals, brittle grass daring the summer. Feeble sprouts pushed through the dirt. 

_ Brriiiiiing!  _

_“_ Someone ought to get that,” said Georgie, straightening her bow tie. 

She stayed sat on her banana crate, sucking her teeth at the next ring prattling on unanswered. Her bow tie was more crooked for her messing with it, but she’d say she liked it that way. She was fabulously good with bow ties. The phone rang on. 

_ Click. _

“Ugh, thank  _ G—,”  _ Rudyard started, promptly cut off by another  _ brriiiiiiing!  _

_ That’s probably for the best, _ thought Antigone, before returning to her wordless despair. Hearing her brother interrupted faded into wishing she’d put on socks and considering the sprouts in the dirt. 

The gasping earth. Crumbly, almost grey dirt, watered only by the occasional widow’s frustrated tears, otherwise thirsting from a week without rain, three weeks without widows, and of course they’d packed away the hose. What were they, rich? 

Catch them rolling in all the money they  _ didn’t  _ make in nearly a month with almost no business and  _ maybe  _ they could afford luxurious dirt, the sweet, black, soggy kind like to test her morbid craft. Chock-a-block with worms and beetles to try their luck against her flawless embalming, each chipping a tooth on her bodies’ perfectly shellacked skin. 

Her fingers twitched, then wilted, forlorn. No bodies. No  _ money _ . She felt her artistic passions draining into her clammy shoes.

_ Brriiiiiiiing!  _

“Not again. Georgie, go and answer that, will you?,” Rudyard sniffed.

“Why don’t  _ you _ answer it? It’s your phone.”

“Because that’s what we pay  _ you _ for.”

“You don’t pay me,” and, “We don’t pay her,” droned in unison. Antigone closed her eyes, trying to ignore the sun and conjure her precious, shady mortuary. She couldn’t do it. Her toes were too squishy. 

“ _ Nobody _ get it. It’s probably just the bill collectors anyhow. We’ve got bigger things to worry about,” she bit out, scratching the beaded bodice chafing her...décolletage. 

“This plan is stupid.”

“No it isn’t! You need only open your minds! Then you’ll see that we can inspire the townspeople of Piffling with our heartfelt display of grief.” Rudyard gestured widely to them in their two tuxedos and one floofy gown. Antigone thought they looked more like confused cake toppers than mourners.  


“By George, it’s foolproof.”

With the last sad stirring of her sweaty spirit, she imagined herself properly buried. She stared enviously into the shallow grave they’d made to attract customers, although Lord and Rudyard knew what all that would do. 

What did a grave know about salesmanship? Nothing, she bet. 

_ She  _ suggested putting another ad out in the paper, but with what funds? All they could do was give into her brother’s enthusiasm. They put on a mock funeral on their doorstep like he’d doodled on a used paper towel, hoisted high above his head to waggle beneath all of their noses. What for? Maybe to remind people of the option? That they could be trusted with something heartfelt?

“They’ll think to have their services with us again. They’ll come flocking, especially after Chapman’s shameful display what with his ‘grief counseling.’ Ha! They’ll remember that nobody knows  _ real misery _ like the Funns and come knocking down our door!”

This wasn’t likely to happen. What Rudyard had failed to comprehend was that Piffling’s residents  _ knew  _ the Funns’ penchant for misery backwards and forwards. The pair proved far too regularly their talent for causing it to their customers. 

Georgie’s nan’s service took any bit of compassion they’d ever had between them. Worthy cause though it was—surely, the worthiest they’d ever have—even the little business they still managed since then had dried up. For a moment, more people than ever flooded in, thinking the wretched Funns brilliant, considerate, creative, and redeemed. 

They’d landed in Chapman’s air balloon to a village of sniffling sighs. For all of ten days, no one had a body they wouldn’t bring their way. 

Then Rudyard named one of the dearly departed, a man who died falling asleep in a hot spring, “Uncle Dumpling,” not knowing he stood chuckling before the man’s very own niece. At which point, Antigone walked in with a bag of Mr. Dumpling’s organs, cooked sous-vide. Exhausted from days of nonstop work, she plopped down on the couch beside the poor girl, registering none of her. The mortician had then rather unfortunately used the cool sack of viscera as a cold compress and promptly fell asleep.

To this day, she felt it was the most restorative nap she’d ever taken. Not only had it returned her vigor, it bought back their horrid reputation threefold. It was the first nap from which she’d woken a complete pariah. Well, perhaps not the first—there  _ was _ camp when she was twelve—but definitely the most memorable.

_ Briiiiiiiing! Briiiiiiiing! _

“Antigone, you get it,” Rudyard tried.

“If I go inside, I will never come out again. Not for work, not for food. Not even on Thursdays.”

“Why, what’re Thursdays?” 

“Hhhhnn.”

She scowled across the square at Chapman’s, the man outside enjoying the weather. Why, he blinded in his white polo and crisply pressed shorts, smiling, running his strong fingers through his gleaming, blond coiffure. He looked like he smelled of Dead Sea cologne. 

He whistled while he directed a small fleet of sprinklers to soak his plush front gardens, whose hedges ran as thick as his sideburns and as straight as his teeth. Those glossy, leafy corners cut clean like his profile, which took splendidly to the island’s unseasonably good day. 

How he managed to have hedges on two feet of pavement lining a cobblestone street, well, it was anybody’s guess, but goodness, were they gorgeous.

Meanwhile, the Funns’ ground lay pounded to dust with a hole and shovel stuck in it. Their handful of brave clovers were stomped flat by a loafer tap-tap-tapping on the end of a jiggly ankle. 

_ Tap  _ and  _ tap  _ and  _ briiiiing:  _ the sounds of madness. 

Besides the ringing and the hissing sprinklers and Chapman whistling  _ his own  _ pop song—top of the charts for a record twenty-seven weeks—she could just hear the pebble rattling in the gap between Rudyard’s ears, skittering even louder than the one knocking around his holey shoe. 

“Ugh, look at him,” he groused. 

“I’d rather not,” Georgie quipped back.

“He thinks he’s better than us because he has  _ business  _ and  _ water  _ and, and—!”

“Grass?”

“We’ve got grass, loads of grass! Too much of it, I’d even say.” 

“Would yah? Fancy that. And where exactly might you be keeping it? Not out here with this scrub brush, I don’t hope. Because that’d be a sad show if you were to ask me.”

“Please, Georgie,” Rudyard scoffed, “I would never ask you anything. Besides, I mean, it only takes a simple look around to see…” He sniffed and thumbed his nose at the balding ground. “Might stand to get rid of some of this, actually. It’s starting to look unkempt. You’re really letting this place go.”

“Hm, alright then. Maybe we can borrow some of Eric’s grass,” which she could’ve only said so flippantly to vex him. She was as likely to ask Chapman for the time as they were to win the lottery. 

Of course Rudyard took offense, but over him, the damned phone started up  _ again  _ and—

“Who the bloody hell is calling us!?” 

Rudyard flew to his feet, bristling, and stormed inside, door slamming so hard behind him it bounced off the doorframe, smacked his hobbled stool, and sent it tumbling into the grave. The women fell silent in attending this tiny funeral, Georgie wondering if it was blasphemy to give a wooden stool a wooden coffin. Antigone only watched the assaulted thing rock to inanimate stillness and wished it were her.

“Now look here—hello? Who’s this calling at all—excuse me! No. I said ‘no,’ are you deaf? I, what—no, let me finish! Well, if you’d  _ shut up— _ !”

“D’you think it’s a client he’s talking to like that?”

“Probably,” Antigone sighed. 

“Yes, yes, well, unfortunately for you, we don’t have one of those and aren’t in the market for one. Well, doubt me all you want, I’ve never heard of him. How do you mean we sound ‘alike’? I don’t like what you’re implying!”

_ If he  _ is _ ruining business again, we’re through,  _ Antigone thought. Then she stopped thinking, as she was already depressed, as well as both dry and several creases too moist. Seeing the approaching cliff as her brother hurtled them over it wouldn’t do her any good. 

“Has anyone ever told you that you’re incredibly rude? Good day!” And the ting of the receiver hitting the cradle. Stomping, swearing as a foot broke through a rotten floorboard they couldn’t replace, and a slick sniffle later, Rudyard returned.

“The nerve of some people today,” he tsked. “Telemarketers! Hounding us all bloody morning, and for what? Some cheap scam! Where’s my stool?”

Her eyes were wet as sand and rasped just so against her eyelids as she looked over. Her brother was barely visible beyond her black tulle veil, torn from the petticoats of an old prom dress. Frightfully old, nearly antique, brought in by poor Mrs. Clampton’s great granddaughter to bury her Bubby in. Bubby, dying of old age, withered, her body drowned in its festive war era monstrosity. 

Like a dried date in a parachute. 

Rudyard thought the dress fair for recycling, saying Mrs. Clampton would hardly miss it. The underpinnings ripped like tissue paper, and now the veil of stolen netting tickled her nose something awful.

Panting under it, she was thirsty like the dirt. Like her eyes lain on Rudyard, who could hardly quench them. There he was, hunched on a box of empty milk bottles, his suit pants riding up his shins. Oh, how she loathed him. 

“What was it they were selling?”

“Who? Selling what now?”

“The telemarketers,” Georgie pressed. “I doubt they rang us all morning to sell like, makeup or car insurance.”

“Oh, uh, something about...something. Pig moles or,” he waved dismissively. “Whatever it was, I’ve already forgotten. Can’t be too important if I’ve forgotten, can it?”

“Why hullo, all!”

The three looked up and squinted into a smile whiter than Rudyard’s calves. 

“God, man, put it out!,” barked Georgie, shielding her eyes. Antigone groaned in tortured agreement. 

“Oh, heh, sorry!” Eric Chapman’s smile dimmed a watt. “How’re you all on this fine summer day?”

Antigone squinted, still hooding her eyes with a trembling hand. 

“We’re fine!,” she wheezed, trailing into a whisper. “Have mercy.”

“Wonderful! And is this, er, ahem,” and he holstered his smile, itself reduced to wobbling as he noticed them—the stool and the shovel resting in questionable peace. 

They watched him drink it in. Birds chirped. A car backfired. 

“I’m sorry. Are you having a funeral for your shovel?”

“For the stool, obviously.”

“Ah? My condolences?”

“They’re not needed! Look at you, weaseling your way across the street. Come to steal our ideas again, eh, Chapman!?,” Rudyard accused. 

“I’ve literally never coveted a single one of your ideas. I doubt it’d be good for my health or that of my clients, even the dead ones. Especially the dead ones,” he shivered. “I still have nightmares about the clowns.”

“That was a very vulnerable moment for me and I’d thankyounottobringitup,” said Antigone. 

“It was a travesty—but in any case! No, Rudyard, I’m not here to hijack your...stool funeral. I’m glad I was able to catch you, actually. For some reason, it’s been hard to pin you all down, almost as if you’re avoiding me—.”

“We are,” said Georgie.

“But since that couldn’t be it—.”

“It is,” Rudyard mumbled.

“I figure you must all be  _ busy  _ or…,” Chapman actively avoided looking at the grave now, his friendly demeanor battling with pity on his stupidly handsome face. “Or something. That’s why I’ve been sent over to deliver a message. You see, I’ve just received the strangest phone call. 

“You Funns never told me you lost your cousin way back when! Oh, I was so sorry to hear it—.”

Georgie leaned in with rapt attention while Rudyard slumped against their home, arms crossed, shins akimbo. 

“Ah yes, that’s what it was. Someone calling with utter nonsense about some distant relative.” He snorted. “We must’ve lost scores of cousins then, since I don’t remember ever having any.”

“I’m lousy with cousins, although none of us care for each other much. If that’s what those calls were about,” said Georgie, petering off to a softer voice, a feeling voice, “I’d have picked it up. It's not right to ignore family.”

“Mightn’t have bothered if I’d known, since we don’t  _ have  _ a cousin. I’m sure of it.”

“Oh, really?” Chapman furrowed his brow and looked back to his parlor uncertainly, as if the caller were stood there in the excellent hedges. “They seemed pretty insistent. Are you sure? Well, I suppose you would know best...hm.”

“Both of our parents were only children,” Antigone explained. “We weren’t raised around any relatives, really, and spent all of our childhoods just with each other.”

“Ah. My condolences.”

“Thank you.” 

“Then my apologies for the mix up! I suppose I’ll leave you to y—!”

“But what did they  _ say _ ?” Georgie was on the edge of her crate now, fists tightening on her knees. Her suit was from Rudyard, so it fit well except for the shoulders which sagged, making her look small and boyish as she gave Chapman a bright, driving stare. 

Eric could see how the question of family ticked something in the usually aloof assistant. Not wanting to disappoint, he told them. 

“I, w-well,” he stammered, “it feels silly now that they’ve got the wrong people, but he said he worked for the Ministry—.”

“Of what?,” asked Antigone. 

“He didn’t specify. He sounded very official though, and only a bit older than either of you. Lovely man, incredibly polite.”

“Pfft!”

“You shut up.” She elbowed her brother in the ribs like to bend him over double, keening. 

“Go on,” she instructed Chapman.

“Well, he said that he’d tried to get in touch as he was investigating an old client of Funn Funerals’. Some twenty years back—I believe he said spring or summer of ‘98?–an older Funn cousin was brought to Piffling to be buried. There’s a record of it on his end, and he started reading off it hoping something would ring a bell. Obviously I told him I was new to the area, so I couldn’t help much.”

“No kidding. What would you know about a dead bloke from twenty years ago?” Georgie relaxed into the mystery and began stroking her chin, humming. The quietude from the talk of late family tucked away. 

Antigone arranged her puffy skirts to touch their knees supportively, just in case, but she made too much noise and ended up kneeing her friend in the ribs. 

“Ouch! Watch it!”

“Sorry. I’m a good friend.”

Eric continued: “He said it was a very barebones service with not a great many attendees, and he’d been having a hard time researching it seeing as this man, while quite notorious, apparently wasn’t very well liked.” 

He said those last words delicately. 

“Hm, maybe he was our cousin,” Rudyard coughed. 

“Yes, nobody likes us.” Antigone watched a pigeon land on their stool and shooed it away. This proved a wasted effort since it found nothing in their yard worth eating, relieved itself, and flew off.

“I like you plenty,” but luckily a bike jingled by just at that moment, drawing Chapman away. “Ah, good morning, Mayor Desmond! I’ll be off, then, Funns, Georgie. Enjoy yourselves!

“Sorry to bother you, Mayor—!”

The three of them sat in stoic silence until Chapman shrunk in the distance. He managed to jog apace the freewheeling politician and had now reached the size of his own action figure, just as peerlessly well-crafted and thankfully  _ away.  _ He looked tiny from so far down the dusty road, so once he was clearly out of earshot, Rudyard cried, appalled: 

“He should be sorry to bother us! ‘Like!?’ Plenty!? The  _ nerve  _ on that man, I’ll tell you—I’ve never seen anything like it! The utter lack of  _ couth _ —.”

“Rudyard, I’ve been meaning to ask—.”

“Not  _ now,  _ Georgie! I’m in a froth!”

She looked to Antigone, who had come over flushed with eyes wobbly with tears. She sat stunned by the sight of Eric Chapman’s tongue touching his perfect teeth to say “like,” stricken not unlike a deer—in lust with the truck hurtling toward it. 

Georgie gave up and let the day roll on, nodding and chatting with the townspeople wandering past, paying the open grave little mind. Eventually, she grew thirsty enough to offer the twins tea, what they called three cups of lukewarm water with one tea bag shared between them. Only being ranted at, she rolled her eyes and sauntered inside.

“Afternoon,” she greeted. The lanky bloke sat at their kitchen table looked up at her with sunken, pitch black eyes and nodded hullo. 

He didn’t talk, this one. The frightful gash in his neck was healed over when they found him, but seemed to patch over the very little throat he had left. Hunched, his stringy hair twisted into a knot and resting between his frightening shoulder blades, he clinked away at glasses and chemicals, an old respirator just barely over this nose and mouth. 

_ “Georgie, say hello to our guest.” _

_ “Who, the zombie?” _

_ “He’s not—!,” Rudyard hissed, crowding in close to mutter, “He’s a  _ paying _ customer!,” and then with loud and obnoxious cheer, he shouted, “Of course, we here at the Funn Extended Stay—and Permanent Rest if you eat the cooking—have nothing against persons from any backgrounds. From any grounds, in general! To each his own!” _

_ Georgie shrugged. So, they were an inn, now: “Hullo, Mr. Zombie, sir. Thank you for staying with us.  _ _ Rudyard, I’m off to work. When Antigone yells about the man popped out of his grave, tell her I told you so. That’s if he hasn’t eaten your brain yet.” _

_ “He can eat whatever he wants if the check clears. This way, good sir! We’ve prepared a room in the attic, only the finest for a distinguished guest.” _

He couldn’t tell them his name. His check only said “Prince,” and cleared just as well, so the Funns never asked. And him having been there a week already without trying anything fishy, Georgie felt inclined to mostly ignore him. He was quiet, which was new, and he only liked his space. She could get that. 

_ Antigone gasped, “He’s paid  _ how  _ much?!?” _

_ Rudyard only handed her the blank check with too smug a smirk, even for him. Georgie whistled, impressed, while Antigone muttered on at war with herself.  _

_ “He’s a walking abomination! An insult to nature, a crime against the laws governing our very existence! Him bursting forth from the earth spits in the face of my entire life’s work!” She argued this while gripping the check hungrily. She even smelled it. Georgie bet it smelled good. _

_ “He can stay as long as he likes!” _

Everything else since felt like a regular day in Piffling, except now with an extra corpse knocking about. And what was one more, really?

“What’re you up to in there!? Two sugars, hop to it! We’re losing daylight!” 

Georgie traded annoyed huffs with their revenant stranger and filled two mugs from the tap. Antigone would need bringing in soon before she dried out. The assistant passed Mr. Prince the water and a teabag for himself, only to be ignored. 

“Well, you’re very welcome,” she grumbled. “Alright, already, I’m coming!”


End file.
